10 reasons why software engineers are overpaid

Is right that software engineers are overpaid and for what reasons?.

what is the secret of getting a lot of money working as a software engineer? is something special that software engineers have or there are things that we are not aware of?

software engineers are working hard than anyone?

So in this article, we’re going to discover 10 determining reasons for the high salaries that software engineers earn.

Are software engineers overpaid?

According to BLS the median average salary of a software engineer is $110,140 per year, and what is amazing is that with only 2 years of experience software engineers could get this salary.

For experienced software developers, the salary could reach $150.000 according to indeed which is considered one of the best stem jobs in the market.

So there is no doubt that the software engineering field is one of the highest-paid jobs in the technology industry.

10 reasons why software engineers are overpaid

market demand

According to BLS 1,847,900 US citizens are only working in software engineering. Most software engineers work for computer system companies and software publishers, manufacturing, finance, and insurance business, and so on.

The market software engineers is a domain that has a high demand due to the speed and technology revolution. In other words, the internet and smartphone technology has created huge job opportunities by building a new market that we did not hear about before.

Amazon only employs 1.5 million workers in many different areas all that happened thanks to the internet evolution.

Amazon, Apple, Google are listed in the top 10 biggest successful companies with 843 billion dollars as a global yearly revenue.

These are the 3 companies that have the best profitable business model in the world. All their services are depending on digitalization. In other words, all their systems are depending on the software, desktop, and mobile application.

So we can imagine the huge dividends of what these companies are getting from software engineering works.

The demand for computer science is 3 times more than a supply

according to Dax 1.4M jobs were unfilled the last year and only the 400k yearly graduate which creates an immense problem of hiring and finding talent in this area. So this is the major reason why software engineers are overpaid.

The market of software development is going too fast than any graduation number could meet. The market is growing every year by 22% that is equivalent to a new half-million job opportunities per year.

Data analytics only cover 43% of shortage specialty that being said more than 600k unfilled data scientists jobs are today in the US only.

The ware of data

So, it is explainable and logical that the salaries of software engineers are on the roof. especially for data analytics, that is due to the new strategy that companies are applying gathering data and information about customers.

So this is why software engineers are overpaid especially, data analysts. Because today data is everything in business. As much as you have data as much business could make significant decisions and meet customers’ expectations and desires.

Software is increasing the productivity

According to Statista, the number of software technology use and spending has increased 3 times this last decade. from 225 billion dollars to 670, which explains the revolutionary technology that the world has known.

Businesses are moving from a classical model to a digital one. So it is almost impossible to find businesses that are not using software management. These technological tool helps business manger to control their data and manage more effectively their business.

Hence the demand for software working development is increasing which give more value to software developer and makes them overpaid.

Fast return of investment

Creating a business in software development is not a hard field that requires huge investments like petroleum or gas companies. To build a software engineering company you need three things experience, market research, a tiny budget to invest in materials like computers and servers.

So there is no need for high and complex machines that cost millions of dollars. As result, encourage a lot of startups to rise and develop new competitive solutions for customers. Therefore, need more and more labor developers.

So why not overpaid software engineers when companies like Google or Facebook are worth billions of dollars without using any single raw of natural material.

Shell and ExxonMobil are using petrol as raw material whereas facebook apple amazon use minded software engineers as their own raw material.

Software engineer is not easy and not for everyone

According to Thinkful computer science has one of the highest major dropouts, almost 10% of computer science dropouts from this stem branch. this number is high compared to other majors like 7% for the business majors.

This indicates that software engineer is not for everyone. especially increasing requirement that market job looking for.

In other words, graduate engineers should be aware of the basic knowledge about the computer before going into this domain. Otherwise many people don’t rather and prefer to go to other majors which increases the scarcity problem of programmers.

The fast expanision of technology

Technology is going fast more than ever was before. According to statista, more than half population are using the internet and exactly 60%. 90% of them are acceding to the internet by using smartphones.

Smartphone technology accelerated dramatically the access of internet use. As a result, creating new opportunities and markets to develop, all that has increased hugely the demand for software engineers.

More than 7 billion persons are using smartphones that means 90% of the earth’s population which is so important to take into consideration.

with more than 4 billion smartphone users all focus is on smartphone applications by finding the way to be more presented and offering more technological solutions.

Softwars buisness are extremlly profitable

Running a business in software engineering is extremely profitable especially when the business idea spread around the world. According to businessofapp only in 2020 facebook generate 85 billion dollars in one year.

Software businesses don’t require big investment and complex infrastructure to operate. So many normal offices can generate money now, more than heavy and technical companies. Software businesses can spread easily around the world.

Selling a product requires export and import fees whereas software doesn’t need any of that. You could sell software around the world with minimal marketing budgets.

For instance, many software engineers are making 6 figures monthly selling software services online. So is not weird that software engineers are overpaid these days.

Devolpers quit their jobs

There is no exact study about this subject But according to Zdnet 21% of software engineers are looking for quitting their jobs for many different reasons. As a result, increase the shortage and automatically increase the value of developers.

So software engineers are also overpaid because a lot of them don’t pursue this field.

Softward engineer are not easily repalceable

Software engineers are not easily replaceable especially for people who are working and have deeper specialization in one area. They have years of experience that allow them to be indispensable in the work environment.

we are not talking about junior programmers. Preparing junior programmers requires at least 1 year of supports and formation to get a reasonable level.

But losing a key person impacted hugely in work and sometimes could threaten the future of many projects around a given specialization.

Junior software engineers need at least 3 years of consistent hard work to understand deeply the domain and reach a good level of programming. So this is one of the reasons why software engineers are overpaid.

Conclusion

software engineers is a domain like any other one that is ruled by the supply and demand law. Currently, as one of the 10 factors that we noticed in our article, the demand is high for software engineers which automatically translates into high salaries opportunities.

So many see it unfair, that many other engineers like manufacturing who are working their face-off and getting half of what developer engineers get.

Unfortunately, the market is ruling, and supply and demand are what valerate people, not their hard work or any other else.